So far, so good ... so Santorum!

Dave Mustaine, lead singer for Megadeth, told the CBC's George Stroumboulopoulos that freedom of speech is his biggest worry.

He then told Stroumboulopoulos, "To me, the guy who makes the most sense out of all those guys is Rick Santorum. He just looked like he could be a really cool President, kinda like a JFK kinda guy."

Rick Santorum wants to assign a little man with a big eraser to wipe out pornography.*



I know that Mustaine turned born-again Christian a few years ago. And if Mustaine's current vision of freedom of speech is consistent with banning pornography, then I'll just disagree with him.

But wouldn't it be nice if there were some kind of knowledge test attached to a ballot so if you were casting a vote for somebody because you say he supports X, but he's actually very publicly promised to ban X, you'd have your ballot discarded? It would be for the voter's own good: a voter protection measure.

HT: @acoyne

* Ah, the good old days.

The market for dodgy

If a consulting firm is asked to produce a dodgy report, and delivers what the client wants, where's the harm? Bill Kaye-Blake asked that last week.

Monday's New Zealand Herald reports:

Crucial figures for the $68.5 million Claudelands Events Centre were influenced by city council staff who increased the number of events and inflated the revenue expected in the first three years of operation.

A $30,000 peer review of the original "overly optimistic" 2009 Claudelands business case has revealed Hamilton City Council staff told the original author of the business case, Campbell Consulting, to increase the already optimistic number of events in the business plan by up to 50 per cent. [Emphasis added]

Staff also used higher revenue projections than those provided in the business case in the council's 10-year budget - inflating the figures in the first three years by between 6 and 11 per cent. But at the same time they lowered the operating costs by 6 to 9 per cent, which made the budgets look more attractive.

Hamilton mayor Julie Hardaker said she was waiting for chief executive Barry Harris to complete his investigation into what happened and refused to speculate on whether the council had been deliberately deceived. Council staff had been unable to explain the variation.

So instead of turning a $1.1 million surplus, Claudelands returned a $1.5 million deficit.

You can argue that Campbell Consulting is entirely blameless. They were asked by Council to provide revenue forecasts under a few different scenarios and did so to the best of their ability. Or, you can argue that they were party to a fraud on predictably gullible Hamilton voters undertaken by the Claudelands's backers within Council; they either knew or ought to have known that the revised figures requested by the funders were hopelessly unrealistic and only really had evil applications.

Voters seem to love Councils putting up big stadiums and events centres - they want to believe the lie that the venue will either turn a profit directly or will stimulate sufficient indirect economic activity to cover its costs in the grand scheme of things. If Campbell hadn't provided the case, somebody else likely would have. There's a demand for dodgy ultimately because voters like it, at least in the short run. I still think we ought heap scorn on those supplying that demand to increase the reservation price for producing dodgy reports. But in a world in which voters have no individual incentive to sort out which firms specialize in dodgy and which ones turn down RFPs where the funders make pretty clear what kind of result they want, it probably doesn't do much to solve things.

HT: Fair Play and Forward Passes, where Sam Richardson writes:

It is a sorry state of affairs, but by no means an isolated event. Hamilton ratepayers don't have to look too far to see a similar story with the V8 supercar race a prominent example. Unfortunately the same story has been repeated all around the world - overstated measures of benefit, understated measures of cost and a projected bottom line that is much more palatable than what actually eventuates.

V8 Supercar Races, Events Centres, Stadiums, Monorails, Escalators to Nowhere...

It's the bet, not the stakes

Robin Hanson wonders why folks have taken offence at Mitt Romney's holding fellow GOP nomination contender Rick Perry^{*, **} to account by offering a bet: $10k if Perry could prove what he claimed existed in Romney's book. Here's Robin trying to make sense of things:

The idea that a presidential candidate couldn’t afford a $10,000 bet is crazy, as is the idea that ordinary folks don’t know this fact. Candidates pay for TV commercials, which cost lots more than $10,000, and they fly all around the nation in planes, which gets expensive.

So clearly we have moved high up into belief meta-levels here. “Yes, most people know Romney can afford $10,000, but some aren’t sure that most others know this, and so this shows that Romney doesn’t know about such folks.” Or “It is rude to point out that you are rich, even when everyone knows you are rich. Yes wearing nice suits shows he’s rich, but not wearing suits is socially unacceptable. Offering smaller bets is acceptable, however, so offering a big bet could be interpreted as bragging about wealth. Not that I’d interpret it that way, but someone might, and this shows Romney doesn’t realize that.”

I'm not generally one to disagree with Robin, but I think explanations based on voters' having sophisticated conjectural variations models in their heads is a bit of a stretch.

My hypothesis: there'd have been just as much offence taken if he'd offered $100 or $1000 stakes. A non-trivial proportion of statements made in political debates are demonstrably false. They're thrown out in the heat of debate with little chance that the opponent will have ready access to counterevidence; worse, there's risk that bringing up counterevidence moves the debate to where the opponent wants to go anyway. Sure, plenty of online armchair quarterbacking lists all the falsehoods. The candidates never have to front up and answer FactCheck or the news articles. But paying up on a bet is far more humiliating, both for the candidate and his supporters. No partisan wants to witness his idol's humiliation in having to pay up. And so they come up with other reasons for being offended.

If partisanship is more faith-based than fact-based, offering a bet in political debate is akin to going into a Catholic Church with a gas chromatograph in the middle of Mass and offering to bet the priest $10,000 that the wafers are chemically identical before and after purported transubstantiation. The followers might say they're offended about the stakes, even though the Church could back it. But the real problem is nobody wanting to see that their prophets are false.

^* Rick Perry's campaign ad, nicely lampooned here, reminded me a lot of the old Dead Milkmen^*** song Stuart. Rick Perry's supporters aren't like the other people here in the trailer park - the ones who don't know what the queers are doing to the soil....

^** Why hasn't anyone done anything useful RickRolling Rick Perry?

^*** First, footnotes in footnotes is cool. Second, the Dead Milkmen are awesome. And "Big Lizard" is the 3-year old's current favourite bedtime song. But I have to Bowdlerize it. And I don't know whether it's better to keep him away from Dead Milkmen 'till he's ready for the proper version, or ease him into it with Bowdlerized versions. Tough problems.

Voters!!! (fist-shaking edition)

It's not surprising, but still depressing, that the kind of people who would vote for Winston Peters are also the kind of people who didn't realize that, if NZ First got 5%, Peters would bring a coterie in with him. Writes talkback radio host Kerry Woodham, who presumably is better placed than most folks to not be surprised about the bottom tail of the voter distribution (HT: @LewStoddart , @SamJBonner):

The post mortem after the election has been interesting on the radio this week.

The number of people who called to say they didn't realise that voting for Winston would mean other people would get in has been teeth-grindingly extraordinary.

"Sooooo," I've been asking, "when you ticked New Zealand First as your party of choice, what did you want to happen?"

"I just wanted Winston to get in to keep the Government honest," they reply.
"And what about the other members of New Zealand First? Did you know who was on the party list?"

"No," they replied as one. "We just thought we'd be getting Winston."

"I was very surprised to see Andrew Williams get in," one exclaimed. "What's he doing there?" she asked.

Here's just one of the winners these folks helped bring to Parliament, courtesy of the Internet WayBack Machine (he's since deleted his homepage).

 PROFILE

Brendan first brought sunshine into New Zealand homes as the 'Weather Man' for the national news on TVNZ's Channel One. Frequently referred to as "Mr Sunshine" or "Mr Personality", Brendan's handsome and cheerful disposition enamored the New Zealand public and set a great many feminine hearts a flutter. Since leaving his day job on national television Brendan has gone on to carve out a successful career as an MC, Public Speaker and Entertainer. He has won the praise of some of NZ's greatest personalities including testimonials from our Olympic Champions, Politicians, A-list NZ corporations and other top class entertainers.

The former male swimsuit model and athlete ‘Brendan who has modeled with Kathy Ireland, Pauline Polinsky and Elle McPherson for 'Sports Illustrated' Magazine, possesses an endearing romantic voice with a casual ‘beach’ charm which is sure to warm hearts. His wonderful onstage charisma will alight fans aglow with comparisons to the ‘big voices’ of Sinatra, Presley and Tom Jones as he brings on the sunshine.

Ah, candidates that set feminine hearts aflutter. Or "a flutter". Either one is just nifty and high praise for our electoral system. I really hope he brings his delightful song stylings to Question Period. I miss hearing John Crosbie sing responses to Shiela Copps in the Canadian Parliament.

Meanwhile, in other belated election campaign fun, I loved the Christchurch Press piece where party leaders were asked about their favourite books and movies. I can't find it now, but a few years back there was a great piece on what people try to signal about themselves when listing their favourite books: learnedness, inquisitiveness, cosmopolitanism, and so on. So a top ten book list was replaced instead with a checklist: "In this spot I will place a book showing I know the canon"; "In this spot I will place a book showing my cultural broad-mindedness" and so on.

So I discounted that the leaders questioned were truthfully revealing anything about their cultural preferences; it was mostly signalling. And, the Press's Charlie Gates seemed to have made similar judgment. I just can't believe that John Key's favourite movie is Johnny English. It can't be. The consequences are too horrifying to contemplate. But, it could be worse; Mitt Romney's favourite book is Battlefield Earth.

Look into the abyss

I've been doing a bit of trawling through the old New Zealand Election Surveys, partially in preparation for a talk I'm giving in a fortnight on voter ignorance, partially in preparing a paper with Bryan Caplan, Wayne Grove, and Ilya Somin on voter ability to correctly attribute political responsibility for outcomes.

One small bit of the darkness: respondents were asked a few quiz questions assessing how well they understand a few basics. Here's the set from 2008, including a new one on Treasury. Correct answers are in bold type.

Question	True	False	"Don't Know"
The term of Parliament is four years	19%	78%	3%
Enrolling as a voter in New Zealand is compulsory.	65%	30%	5%
It is not necessary to be a New Zealand Citizen to be eligible to vote in New Zealand	28%	58%	14%
Interest rates in New Zealand are set by the Treasury	42%	37%	22%
New Zealand is a member of the World Trade Organization	81%	2%	17%

Maybe this answers Matt Nolan's question about why the #OWS folks protested outside of the wrong agency. They may simply confused about who is responsible for what.

88% of respondents agreed it is a citizen's duty to vote.

The 63% who did not know who sets interest rates in New Zealand ought to read Brennan's argument that those choosing to vote have a duty to vote well.

The Marijuana Vote

The age breakdown in the latest US Gallup poll is the best argument for increasing youth voter turnout. Overall support for legalizing marijuana has just passed 50% in the US. But the age breakdown would likely have the median voter still in opposition.

Support for legalizing marijuana is directly and inversely proportional to age, ranging from 62% approval among those 18 to 29 down to 31% among those 65 and older. Liberals are twice as likely as conservatives to favor legalizing marijuana. And Democrats and independents are more likely to be in favor than are Republicans.

More men than women support legalizing the drug. Those in the West and Midwest are more likely to favor it than those in the South.

I wish there were current New Zealand polling data on this one.

Immigrants

The Head of Maori Studies at Auckland, Professor Margaret Mutu, called this weekend for restrictions on immigration of people of European ancestry:

A Maori academic says immigration by whites should be restricted because they pose a threat to race relations due to their "white supremacist" attitudes. The controversial comments come in response to a Department of Labour report, obtained exclusively by the Sunday Star-Times, which found Maori are more likely to express anti-immigration sentiment than Pakeha or any other ethnic group. Margaret Mutu, head of Auckland University's department of Maori studies, agreed with the findings and called on the government to restrict the number of white migrants arriving from countries such as South Africa, England and the United States as they brought attitudes destructive to Maori. "They do bring with them, as much as they deny it, an attitude of white supremacy, and that is fostered by the country," she said.

The survey results are no particular surprise, at least as far as ethnic differences go:

Maori were the least likely to consider New Zealand a welcoming place and the most likely to want less migration. Maori were the most likely to disagree with positive statements about immigration and most likely to agree with negative statements. These results are backed up by other studies which have reported less positive attitudes towards migrants and immigration by Maori. The negative statement that Maori are most likely to agree with is Migrants take jobs away from other New Zealanders with almost half of Maori (45 percent) agreeing with this. This is higher than those agreeing with the statements around immigration being a threat to New Zealand’s culture, suggesting that the reasons for the more negative views of Maori have an economic basis. This is likely to be because migrants are seen as a threat in the job market, particularly during a recession.  

The ethnic differences correspond with what I've found in the New Zealand Election Survey. Here are some results from the 2008 NZES. Note that the researchers oversampled Maori and youth; results presented here haven't corrected for the oversampling. But as we're mostly interested in whether immigration sentiment has an ethnic correlate, the oversampling ought only increase the precision of the estimate unless the oversample draws disproportionately from segments more heavily anti-immigrant.

A few cross-tabs results.

The NZES asks whether New Zealand ought to increase or decrease the number of immigrants (zimmig). Among those providing a response (excluding the roughly 5% of both groups that say "don't know"), the median person not claiming New Zealand Maori background says immigration levels ought to remain the same; the median respondent claiming New Zealand Maori background says immigration ought to be reduced "A little". But look at the difference in the cross tabs here:

Increase or decrease immigrants	Not Maori	Maori
Increase a lot	4%	2%
Increase a little	13%	5%
Same	36%	23%
Reduce a little	26%	25%
Reduce a lot	20%	45%

The results really don't change much if you use different ethnicity measures.

On the whole, there's not much support for increasing immigration, which is pretty disappointing. Maybe this is driven by the 2008 survey's having been conducted at the time of the global financial crisis. But, the figures from the 2005 survey, at the height of an economic boom with a massively overheated labour market, aren't a lot different. Among non-Maori, support for reduced immigration drops from a total of 46% (2008) to 40% (2005). But 48% of Maori respondents in that 2005 survey replied "Reduce a lot", with another 25% saying "Reduce a little". So, during a boom time, Maori opposition to immigration was higher than it is now. A couple quick regressions on the 2008 data suggest the ethnic divide remains very strong after controlling for ideology, urban/rural status, income, education, age, employment status, owning your own home, household finances as compared to a year ago, having children, and a few other things. 

So that there's a rather strong ethnic divide on immigration desirability seems reasonably robust.

Now, the 2008 survey doesn't ask the question, but the 2005 survey does: "Is immigration good for the economy?" The Department of Labour survey suggests concern about economic effects of immigration as driving ethnic differences. The raw data suggests the same in the NZES (2005). Among those not claiming Maori descent, over 60% agreed or strongly agreed that immigration is good for the economy. Among those claiming Maori descent, only 35% did. But if we look at correlates of policy views in the 2005 dataset, and include a whole whack of control variables I'm not going to bother mentioning (huge kitchen sink), the coefficient on Maori ethnicity is only cut by roughly twenty percent if you control for views on whether immigration helps or hurts the economy. So Maori anti-immigrant sentiment isn't just driven by differences in views of how the economy works.

And so it's odd then to see calls for Margaret Mutu's resignation. 

"As a Maori, I welcome white immigrants," [Ngapuhi leader David] Rankin said. "They are the ones most likely to bring employment opportunities for our communities, and we don't see the sort of racism Margaret refers to."

Rankin said Mutu has no place working at a university.

"I think Auckland University are scared of her," he said. "And so they lack the courage to deal with her, but I think after this episode, they will be having another look at her position and the harm she is bringing to Auckland University."

Rankin said Mutu was a "champagne radical" who turned up to a foreshore and seabed hikoi in her "Armani suit".

"What she doesn't realise is she's actually pulling Maoridom apart - she's an absolute trouble maker."

Rankin said he didn't think Mutu believed a word she said and would probably "hide behind" a section in the Education Act that affords her the right to speak as the "critical consciousness of society".  

Mutu's controversial comments came in response to a Department of Labour report which found Maori are more likely to express anti-immigration sentiment than Pakeha or any other ethnic group.

I'm totally with Rankin on the desirability of immigration. But Mutu's views are hardly idiosyncratic among Maori, at least as far as the NZES data suggests. 

And I get worried when employment protection accorded academics when acting in a critic and conscience role is called "hiding behind" a section of the Education Act. Especially since much of what appears on this blog enjoys that status.

Blaming the Press

Jay Rosen very nicely lays out the problem. Journalism has shifted entirely from discussion of the relative merits of policies and their likely effects to the horse-race. All attention goes to how policies might play with the electorate. He blames the "cult of savviness": readers are invited to be insiders, along with the journalists, in trying to guess political party strategies and tactics, and whether those will be effective.

I'm with Rosen on the problem. But his while his solution may be elegant for those who wish to eschew the horse-race and focus on the issues, those folks already can get the analysis they want. There are, believe it or not, more serious news outlets that do provide analysis of the issues. And blogs help too, if you know what to look for. Where do I go if I want reasonable analysis of NZ policy issues? I'd start with the National Business Review. The Christchurch Press's Mainlander section on Saturdays is surprisingly meaty. And, just ignore the ones that go for sensationalism.

The real problem is that relative demand for thick policy analysis is much much smaller than for the horse-race. If politics is mostly about group-affiliation and status-seeking, people will care more about whether their team is likely to do well than about the effects of policy. And there's really not much that can be done about that. It's like complaining that Firefly gets cancelled after a season while we're into I have no clue which season of Big Brother. There are places folks who want decent TV can go - HBO for starters. The rest is pablum. Complaining that most TV producers make pablum while ignoring that most viewers really really like pablum kinda misses the point. The bigger problem is that while I can exempt myself from trash TV by just changing channel, I can't exempt myself from trash policy.

Stealth Taxes

Frances Woolley argues the case for hidden taxes:

Visible taxes can lead to bad policy choices when a tax's visible incidence is different from its actual incidence. The average tax payer will vote for a tax/benefit scheme that appears to be in his or her interests - for example, increased health care spending financed by increased corporate income taxes - not realizing that the burden of the corporate income taxes might be shifted forward onto customers or backwards onto employees - in other words, right back onto the average tax payer.

It's a nice second-best argument. And, consistent with one of my favourite papers in experimental economics (previously discussed here): Sausgruber and Tyran's finding that buyers in a double-auction will happily vote for inefficient redistribution programmes framed as a tax on sellers but will oppose it when framed as a tax on buyers, despite equivalent incidence.

I'm not sure that a tax's invisibility necessarily protects against stupidity. New Zealand's clean GST is built into consumer prices; there's still not unreasonable pressure to wreck it by exempting food. But, that Labour's only advocated the wrecking ball when safely away from the Treasury benches suggests something.

Frances continues:

A final argument for stealth taxation is that it facilitates budget balance.  People want good things from their governments, like health care and old age pensions. But they don't want to pay taxes. So the temptation is to vote for spending initiatives and vote against any tax increases. When taxes become more visible, people become more aware of the taxes that they are paying, and lobby harder for tax cuts. The result: future generations are burdened with debt and taxes.

Now the argument could be made that in fact invisible taxes contribute to government debt - if the average voter realized how little he benefited from the Bush (Bush-Obama?) tax cuts, how much those tax cuts benefitted the richest Americans, and just how mind-bogglingly rich the richest Americans are, perhaps he would have voted against them. I don't know of any decisive evidence on this point, so if you disagree, feel free to say so in the comments.

Some degree of visibility in taxation is desirable - without information how the tax system works, and who bears the burden of taxation, it is difficult to make good policy decisions.

This is a fun one to think through. Specify that voters are largely ignorant but will vote against anybody they think is to blame for bad outcomes. And, specify a Westminsterian system so they know who's to blame for bad outcomes. In that world, I'm not sure whether it matters a lot whether the taxes are hidden or visible. If taxes with too high of deadweight losses are used to fund services of too little value, incumbents get turfed. Maybe it takes slightly longer if policy has lagged effects. Retrospective economic voting then saves things. If there's no opacity, the ruling party has to balance losses from bad effects of policy against loss in popularity from running "works, but unpopular" policy. At least there's weight on the effects of policy despite voters not knowing a damned thing except what they see out the window.

In a political system where responsibility attribution is more difficult - either Parliamentary with PR and powerful committees or a Presidential system with strong division of power and a federalist structure - things are harder to work out and could then persist longer. Then there's rather less incentive to weigh the effects of policy; rather, you blame the President if you're Congress, blame the other party in Congress if you're the President, blame the State if you're local government. Blame gets spread and incentives for good policy are flattened.

I'm also not sure that complete opacity is as good an idea in a Brennan-Buchanan Leviathan taxation world than in a Musgrove benevolent despot one.

Sports and science journalism

Thomas Lumley's fed up with lazy reporting in the sciences:

if a press release or a wire service story told you that the Wallabies had a new training regimen that would improve their game without making them fitter, faster, tougher in the scrum, more accurate with kicking, or better at putting in the elbow, you’d ask questions. We’d like to see science journalism eventually get up to the standard of sports journalism.

He points the finger at journos who gulped down the claim that an hour of TV watching costs 22 minutes of life expectancy [which I'd critiqued here]. And, because his stats-fu is better than mine (and probably because he read the studies a bit more closely than I did), he notes:

The journal, in its blog, says that the real story was about sedentary lifestyles vs exercise.  They are shocked — shocked — to find that there might be sensational news coverage of the article. However, they do note:“The blast of news coverage also suggests that creative research angles on behavioral health impacts are useful in grabbing the public imagination.” Indeed.

The really strange thing about the paper, though, is the 22 minutes of life lost per hour of TV.  Looking at the confidence intervals shows that there is huge uncertainty (the range is from 20 seconds to 45 minutes), but it still doesn’t really make sense.  Some of this is just correlation vs causation — in reality, not everyone who spends the evening in front of the TV would spend the time jogging, or even playing golf, if their Sky subscription were cut off.   The other component is the model used for years-of-life lost.  The researchers didn’t actually do anything with individual participant data from the AusDiab study. They took the results of a previous analysis (which didn’t get nearly as much coverage) and added in the assumption that the effect of TV weakened with age.  Under that assumption, the effect must be a lot larger for younger people than it appears, and since younger people have more minutes of life to lose, that increases the average cost of TV.  The assumption was described  by the authors as if it was a universal fact, and it’s true that several important risk factors follow this pattern — one reason is that there are more things to die of at older ages, which applies here, but another is that, eg, low blood pressure in older people happens for bad reasons as well as good, and that doesn’t apply here.  In any case the attenuation assumption is doing a lot of the work, and it is only weakly connected to any actual data.

I'm very pleased that there's somebody else out there who cares about this stuff. It's really a bit pointless though. Papers exist to sell eyeballs to advertisers. Most of those eyeballs are in front of squishy grey stuff that doesn't care a whole lot about scientific accuracy but rather about group affiliation and sensationalism. The real problem is on the demand side. We get the journalism we deserve. Just like we get the politics we deserve.

Show business for ugly people?

Well, maybe only for those who are only ugly on the inside. Ugly on the outside: that'll turn off voters.

A new Massachusetts Institute of Technology study found that so-called “low-information voters” — those who watch a lot of TV but who aren’t up-to-date on policy issues — are most likely vote for a candidate based on looks alone.

For every 10-point increase a candidate gets because of his or her appearance, about half of that increase comes from the voters with the least amount of political knowledge and the most time spent in front of the TV.

The study analyzed data from two surveys conducted during the 2006 midterm elections: the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, which surveyed voters on their candidate preferences and television-watching habits; and a study headed by Princeton University professor Alex Todorov, which asked participants to rate ’06 Senate and gubernatorial candidates based solely on appearance.

“People judge other people all the time when they first meet them, but once they learn more about them they update their impressions and forget their initial judgments,” said MIT associate professor Gabriel Lenz, who co-authored the study. “The problem with democracy is that we ask people to vote in all these elections where they don’t know all that much except their first impression.”

Here's the full paper.

In equilibrium if we've a thick market of potential candidates, I can't see how this generates any particular inefficiency. Sure, it gives an additional dimension over which parties need to optimize in candidate selection, but in sufficiently thick markets, the tradeoff in moving from the slightly less attractive to the slightly more attractive candidate won't be that large. The only problem is if you've got thin markets such that the quality gap on other margins is large as you move up the beauty scale. But that too should be a disequilibrium phenomenon. They've said that politics is show business for ugly people. Well, if the returns to beauty start ramping up in political markets relative to other markets, more beautiful people start selecting into politics rather than other endeavours. Hamermesh found that the beautiful select into professions where beauty is rewarded; why should this be any different?

Alternatively, suppose that one of the main outputs of politicians is preening on television. Policy is secondary. Don't we all enjoy greater consumption benefits from seeing attractive people on television than from seeing unattractive people? Marketers clearly think so; check the cast of the average sitcom or commercial.

If your expectations of policy and politicians are sufficiently low, it's harder to get worked up about how things could be worse. The losses from idiot voters choosing the most attractive candidate seem unlikely to be particularly worse than the overall losses from idiot voters full stop.

New Zealand data from 2005 suggested the most politically ignorant voters disproportionately leaned Labour. Is this confirmatory or contrary evidence?

Bad economics, good politics

Seamus wonders whether politicians can signal sincerity by advocating policies that they know will be unpopular: the doctor who prescribes bad-tasting medicine may be more credible than the one whose remedies taste sweeter.

As with everything else, there's a literature on this. Long story short: politicians do better by pandering.

Let's run a Wittman line as a starting point. Specify two parties and two potential policies. Party A says policy 1 is best for the country; policy 1 is generally disliked by voters. Party B says policy 2 is best for the country; voters' priors tell them policy 2 is better. A bunch of economics wonks jump up and down about policy 1 being the better one; a bunch of talk show demagogues say economists can't predict anything. If voters are rational truth seekers who care about achieving the best outcomes, they'll discount the demagogues and vote for Party A. In that world, pandering can't be maintained, just as a used car dealer can't pass off a Trabant as a Porche.

Add the Caplan / Brennan twist that because voters really don't affect outcomes, they've little incentive to vote instrumentally; they vote to ally with groups with which they affiliate, to express their preferences about what the world could be like, to tell themselves and others what good people they are. Pandering can work in this world.

Now, look out into the real world. If Seamus were right that advocating sensible policies were best, or even were occasionally best, then we'd expect a whole lot better policy to emerge from the political process. Political markets are competitive; if voters wanted the effective but unpalatable medicine, they'd vote for it. Pointing to the NZ reforms of the 80s just says that voters will recant from Christian Science when the deathbed otherwise looms.

As for the lit, here's a couple worth checking:

• Ilya Somin, contra Jacobs and Shapiro
• Ashworth and Shotts: media monitoring of politicians can make pandering worse.

Unfortunately, politicians are largely constrained by what voters want, and what voters claim to want when at the ballot box is generally awful.